On behalf of the editorial board, the editors of Government and Opposition are pleased to announce the winners of the first annual ‘best article’ prize, named in memory of long-time editorial board member Elisabeth Meehan (1947-2018). This prize is offered to the non-commissioned, peer-reviewed, original research article published in the print issue of the journal during the previous calendar year that the editorial board members believe best represents the scholarly excellence of the journal and the tradition of commitment to public discourse on important topics in comparative politics that Government and Opposition has maintained for more than fifty years.
The prize winners for Volume 52 (2017) are Elina Kestilä-Kekkonen and Peter Söderlund for their article entitled: ‘Is it All about the Economy? Government Fractionalization, Economic Performance and Satisfaction with Democracy across Europe, 2002−13’.
While previous research has generally shown that economic performance is an important predictor of satisfaction with democracy, differences between political systems on the majoritarian–consensual dimension have not been as marked as expected. What has been neglected in previous studies is how the interaction between economic performance and type of power-sharing arrangement co-produce democratic satisfaction. This study uses multiple rounds of data from the European Social Survey between 2002 and 2013 involving 31 countries. The results show that short-term changes in economic performance and government fractionalization interactively increase or decrease levels of political support. The effect of economic performance on satisfaction with democracy becomes weaker the more fractionalized a government is. Satisfaction with how democracy works in a country remains relatively high in systems with fractionalized coalition governments when the economy is performing poorly. But when the economy performs extraordinarily well, satisfaction with democracy is even higher in countries with a dominant party in charge of government power.
The complete bibliographic citation for this work is:
Elina Kestilä-Kekkonen and Peter Söderlund, ‘Is it All about the Economy? Government Fractionalization, Economic Performance and Satisfaction with Democracy across Europe, 2002−13’, Government and Opposition: An International Journal of Comparative Politics, 52:1 (January 2017): 100–130. https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2015.22.
